Garden of Words

The Baby Factory: A River Holiday

Thea spent most of the Fourth of July weekend hoofing it around her great-grandfather's river property -- chasing kittens, picking up rocks and dropping them in a green bucket, laughing at her Pop Pop, and keeping us from sleeping.

Nikole's dad went to pick up her grandfather's boat from the boatyard on Broad Creek, and Nikole and Thea took a short cruise with him back to the family boathouse. Thea's first boat excursion, and she loved it!

This is what a tired baby looks like at 7:45 in the morning when she doesn't sleep the night before.

She decided that she's a big fan of sitting in the sand and picking things up.

Again and again and again.

Thea's Pop Pop

One of our best reasons to visit Deltaville is to spend time with Nikole's grandfather -- Thea's great-grandfather. Almost everyone in the family calls him Pop Pop, and he's just beside himself to have two great-grandchildren with a third on the way. (That would be courtesy of Nikole's brother and sister-in-law, I should point out.)

Another Perfect Deltaville Sunset

After spending several dozen Fourth of July holidays at one river house or another along the Rappahannock and Piankatank rivers, I think we actually experienced something close to the perfect holiday -- especially weather-wise -- this Fourth of July.

Nikole, Thea and I arrived at Nikole's grandfather's house -- his property bumps up against the Rappahannock River, the Chesapeake Bay and Broad Creek -- early in the afternoon on Friday. The temperature was in the mid-80s, the sun was shining and a strong breeze was blowing across the point. It's important to note that there was no humidity. That's a rarity in Virginia in July.

Nikole took a great series of sunset photos (these photos) that captured at least a slice of the weekend. It was fairly low-key -- hanging out with her grandfather and his wife, her dad, visiting with friends along the point, taking Thea to see some new kittens, Thea's first boat ride, cooking, reading.

We missed Nikole's brother, sister-in-law and nephew, who usually find themselves at the river with us during holiday weekends, but enjoyed a low-key few days that ended with overcast skies and showers on Sunday morning -- a great incentive to head back to Richmond and start a new week.

The Baby Factory: Visiting Omie

One of our other Father's Day activities was a trip across the river with Thea and Rilo to visit my mom -- Thea's Omie. It was loads of fun watching the two of them connect, and seeing how much fun my mom has when she gets to be a big goofball.

I think my dad and stepmother both would have been pretty smitten by our little girl.

The Baby Factory: Play Day on the Bay

We took Thea and Rilo to Nikole's grandfather's place on the Chesapeake Bay last week, and everyone had a glorious time (though I think Pop Pop wanted to kill the dog with her constant and shrill barking). I think this is a series of photos that almost speaks for itself.

The Garden, Despite Our Efforts

It's been a challenging year for the gardens at our house -- that would be the vegetable garden, as well as the flower beds. We're almost at the stage with Thea where we can actually do some things, but not quite at a place where hanging out weeding with her works as well as it should. Also, she swells like a blowfish about 20 seconds after a mosquito stings her.

But it's been nice to see the gardens flourish, despite our half-attentive efforts to keep them happy. That's especially true of the flower beds, which were mostly planted three and four years ago and are finally coming into their own.

 

Our lavender, for instance, has really thrived along the side of our house -- we have two massive clumps of the stuff now that have been flowering like mad for weeks already. (Nikole took the above picture of some of the lavender.)

 

We planted tons of echinacea from seed about four years ago and now have gorgeous clumps of the stuff rising into the air with its soft purple hue.

 

The Baby Factory: The Morning Ritual

This photo was taken on Father's Day, which was the morning that Nikole had planned for me to sleep late. Thea had other ideas, and since Nikole was up all night with her, I went on duty as the sun rose.

It's sort of a morning tradition now. Thea wakes us at an insufferable hour, wide awake and eager to greet the world. I get up with her so Nikole can have an extra hour of sleep. Thea and I change some diapers, eat some breakfast and then head out for a walk with the dog while Nikole eats and gets dressed. This gives us some semi-quality dad-and-daughter time, and preps Nikole for the next nine hours -- which usually involve her trying to keep up with our darling locomotive.

And while no one got much sleep on Father's Day, we had a lovely breakfast together at Cafe Gutenberg and Nikole and Thea loaded me down with cards and gifts.

Bipolar Puppy

The ratio is so messed up. It takes about one minute of play to generate one hour of sleep for our dog. The photo at the top is Rilo going insane on the beach in Deltaville. Hours later, back in Richmond, and we get something entirely different.

The Baby Factory: Portrait of a Daughter as Adorable

I know it's my job to praise her for her precocious smile and general good looks, but come on. She really is quite the cutie!

The Baby Factory: Bucking Bronco

Looking for a way to exhaust our inexhaustable daughter recently, we found ourselves wandering the Stony Point Fashion Park -- attracted by the idea of an outdoor water play area and the fact that we had Rilo with us and the place is dog-friendly.

Thea would have been content to have sat on the bronze dog statue all day long. Rilo would have been just as happy to have loitered longer in the dog treat store. Neither got their way.

San Pellegrino, Release Me!

Thanks to Costco's new-found ability to convince me to buy my entire life in bulk, I am rapidly working my way through a case of San Pellegrino Limonata and Aranciata.

Naturally, it brings to mind one of my favorite images from my summer in Europe (circa: a long time ago) -- a sticker emblazoned with a smiling orange with a straw poked directly into its cerebral cortex. The caption: Una spremuta? Perche no? (A fresh squeezed? Why not?)

I will be sad when we run out of these magical San Pellegrino canned drinks.

Paragraphs About Poems: Provence

The second poem distinctly related to Nikole is "Provence". It is a poem thick with the places of our honeymoon in southern France, and I really wrestled initially with the fact that it was so littered with place names. Once I stopped wrestling, stopped trying to turn it into some deeper story, I was able to finish it.

I'm not sure the bulk of the poem does justice to the final stanza, which originally began the poem. I could live in that single stanza for a long time.

Read "Provence" here.

The Baby Factory: Separated at Birth

It's hard to determine from this series of photos whether Thea favors Molly Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" or Mike Ness of Social Distortion.

Please notice the surprisingly clean floor in the background. This photo was taken moments before Thea proceeded to move all of the beans and pasta from her tray to the floor -- sometimes it's because she thinks Rilo is being starved, sometimes it's because she's just done, sometimes she's just having a good time.

Please notice that she a) is not wearing her standard "eating shirt" and that b) her shirt is clean. We call that luck around these parts.

Paragraphs About Poems: My Grandfather's Art

I mentioned before that my grandfather died before I was born. I spent a long month trying to imagine who he was from a collection of artifacts I inherited when my own father died -- his paintings, his letters. He was an artist, and he was a commercial sign painter, and he owned a small grocery store on Mulberry Street between Stuart and Grove avenues. When his own father was dying, he and my grandmother took him into their home. My grandfather wrote in a letter to his brother of the pain of seeing their father lie in bed, staring at his own face in the mirror as life bleached from it. That is, honestly, all I know.

It was all I needed to know to write another poem thick with beautiful imagery.

"My Grandfather's Art" started in my old apartment during a rainstorm, as I listened to the wind and rain push through open windows. The rest almost literally flowed out of me while I sat, except for the word aestival. I don't know why I felt so compelled to use it. I like that it ends as it began.

Read "My Grandfather's Art" here.

Our Dog: Handsome/Devil

Although she's a bit of a nut and skittish as a colt, our little Bernese Mountain Beagle is quite the cutie. Except when you get an extreme close-up at just the right angle of her fierce underbite. Then, she just looks sort of freakish.

The Baby Factory: Water Baby

Nikole had already taken Thea to splash around in the water area of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden children's area, but when I was confronted with a half-day of watching a restless toddler who had just learned to walk it moved right up on my list.

I was surprised that there were only four other kids splashing in the water when we arrived just after 4:00 on a hot Saturday afternoon, but also pleased. It meant that I could let Thea stroll around barefoot, mesmerized by the streams of water jetting up from the ground and cascading around her.

Next time, I'm putting her in a bathing suit.

The New Office in its Orange Glory

If I painted all four walls vibrant orange, I would go insane within a day.

I'm in the process of relocating to a permanent office space, a suite that I'm subletting from Zeigler|Dacus Marketing at 110 East Cary Street. My new space is relatively large -- perhaps 16x20 -- which gives me room for a couple of desks and a small, casual conference area.

Step one was getting a wall painted.

Step two will be organizing my books, files and assorted desk items.

Step three? The impossible task of furnishing a casual conference area with smart, stylish furniture on the cheap.

Cat in the Box

The worst thing about having a baby? The cats and dog get virtually no photographic attention.

The upside -- for one of the cats, anyway -- is that Thea's accessories provide plenty of interesting places to take a cat nap. The other morning I discovered Harvey nestled in one of Thea's canvas toy boxes, surrounded by stuffed animals.

Paragraphs About Poems: Leaving Greenhill Road

My stepmother and father moved to a farm in a small Quaker community in North Carolina when I was in my early teens -- after several years of long weekends, several a month, spent visiting her father there. It was her grandparents' farm, and it was where I learned how to split wood, string barbed wire, slaughter pigs, hunt, swim in red mud ponds and enjoy college basketball. I don't do any of those things now, but all of my weekends and summers spent with them at that place, and with that community of amazingly caring people in Saxapahaw, left deep impressions on me.

My father died on that farm just four months after being diagnosed with cancer. The anniversary of his death, his wife -- my stepmother and dear friend -- was diagnosed with cancer; she died days before the anniversary of their wedding.

Nikole and I went to visit her a few weeks before she went into hospice. We walked the woods of my youth, and I knew that I would never walk them again. And I knew that as important as that community had been in the creation of my core, I would never really return to it.

I wrote the last stanza of this poem, "Leaving Greenhill Road", one afternoon, the spring after Amy's death, as I quietly placed plants we removed from their gardens into my own yard. She taught me about love, about faith, about friendship. And she taught me about plants.

Powerful gifts, all.

Read "Leaving Greenhill Road" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Engagement

Since I wrote about an ending yesterday, I thought today should return us to beginnings.

I proposed to Nikole in November of 2004, and gave her a ring of red, polished sea glass that our friend Nancy had molded into a gorgeous piece of jewelry. I was also working on this poem, "Engagement", at the time. It was the first piece I'd written specifically related to Nikole and our relationship, which was significant in many ways.

I tried to capture the promise inherent in starting something with someone, of pausing at the moment it begins.

Read "Engagement" here.

Paragraphs About Poems: Elegy for September 10

"Elegy for September 10" ranks extremely high on my list of poems I find immensely satisfying to revisit, reread, reexamine.

I actually flew out of New York City on September 10, 2001. Summer broke that weekend along the East Coast, and the skies were crisp and clear and cool. I had been in the city on and off for a year, working on a very broken marriage and filled with the belief that fixing it was just the thing you did. When I left early that Monday morning, it was with a sense of possibility and tentative plans to quit my life in Richmond and relocate.

The poem started with fragments, dredged from somewhere deep within. The first four lines emerged almost unscathed through weeks and weeks of revision, as I polished the poem down to as raw and lean a state as its language demanded. What emerged was a piece of writing that distinctly captures the hope, the pain, the longing -- for closure and for implosion -- and the hint of something truly terrible in the air.

That, of course, came a day later when New York fell in on itself and my marriage fully unraveled.

Read "Elegy for September 10" here.